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It sounded like a good idea: Windows 10 users could talk to Amazon’s Alexa running on Echo devices using Cortana. Unfortunately, Microsoft seem to be falling behind somewhat.

Currently there are four main voice recognition systems competing for the consumer’s attention: Siri (Apple), Google Home (Google), Alexa (Amazon) and Cortana (Microsoft).

Amazon and Microsoft have planned to team up and their project to develop a combined speech recognition assistant was supposed to be finished by the end of 2017, but there’s still no sight of it.

In a press conference, Javier Soltero, Vice President of Cortana at Microsoft, promised that they were working to continue to deliver a great user experience. He said that customers would not want a product that wasn’t ready to be brought to Windows 10, hence the delay. Microsoft and Amazon are still trying to work out how to fit their products together, and it’s likely to take a long time.

Apparently, the whole process is more difficult than was first imagined, and linking the two systems via smart speakers (to create appointments in your Outlook calendar, for example), is taking them longer than they thought. Hopefully they’ll manage to get their software in place in time for the next major Windows 10 update.